T Mark has mentioned again recently that one of the minor joys of collecting games for the GoGoD database is finding games missed from the Collected Games editions. There is more to be found than perhaps you imagine. There were 801 games in our first complilation of Go Seigen games about 15 years ago (or is it more? - how time flies). We are now nudging 900, with Mark finding a few more in the last week or so.

But that is often just squirrelling nuts away. Every now and then there is a game we see mentioned, that is even more significant in some special way, and we just can't get our hands on it. That frustration I felt when I was writing "The Meijin's Retirement Game." There is a reference at the very end of one of the sources, Kawabata's "Meijin" (translated as Master of Go), to a couple of games played by Shusai on 7 January 1940, his last games before his death on 18 January. Since "Meijin" is a fictionalised account, it is sometimes hard to know what is true and what is made up, and these games are certainly not in the Collected Games.

But we now have Shusai's last game! It is given here. It was broken off at move 130, because (Kawabata says) Shusai was tired out, and Black was ahead anyway. Kawabata says the opponent was "a strong amateur of the First Rank" (i.e. 1-dan), but I can now tell you that it was Sakauchi Junei, who made major contributions to the miai counting theory of boundary plays. That was published a little later, in the mid 1950s, by which time Sakauchi was 5-dan, not because he had improved that much but that was when amateurs had started having their own rankings. Sakauchi also wrote a major article on what was the first attempt to count the territory associated with thickness.

This seems an appropriate way to start what I shall call a Shusai Week.